


Le Beau et la Bête

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume II [3]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, d'Artagnan Romances (Three Musketeers Series) - All Media Types
Genre: 17th Century, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anal Sex, Blasphemy, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Pre-Canon, Reunion Sex, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-13 00:03:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4499949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lovers are reunited and have to make up for lost centuries. By unmanning each other in a manly fashion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Blois, France, 1617**

Everything around the château de Bragelonne was bursting into summer bloom. The white building was nested in a carousel of sycamores and chestnuts, their delicate blossoms wafting in the summer breeze like fragile snow cones. I reined in my horse to take in the view: just another of many toy castles that littered the landscape of the Loire valley.

Grimaud and I had traveled here from England, keen on testing my ability to impersonate this comte de La Fère, whose identity I had inadvertently assumed. In the weeks leading up to our arrival, I had taken it upon myself to familiarize with the heraldry and histories of the great families of France, including the clan de La Fère. I had long learned from my stay on Rhodes that many of the great families of Europe claimed parentage from the local deities, through the enactment of what many, in ignorance, would deem a demon deal. And why not? To a Christian, the water nymphs were as demonic as they were divine to me. It would probably not surprise you to learn then that the Bourbons were one such family, for, as you might recall, they had owned Rhodes at the time of my sojourn there. I was, therefore, even more intrigued to see how far they’d come, and visit this country that was now presided over by a descendant of the Nereids. The La Fères, however, I suspected claimed no such ancestors among them, their familial star setting rather than rising.

My cunning factotum had condescendingly informed me that my French could be honed with the old viscount and that I could blame any linguistic discrepancies on my travels abroad. I shot him a murderous look.

“Go announce me, Olympian gnat,” I snarled. It was all very fine and good for him to have reincarnated as an honest-to-Ave-Jesus Frenchman, but for those of us who have slept under the sea for nigh two centuries, it was a cold comfort.

Auguste, le vicomte de Bragelonne was a benevolent soul, as I had already suspected from his letter which I found among the count’s papers in London. He greeted me with the warmth the best of mortals reserve for long lost kin. His brother, my investigations told me, had been the father of the comte de La Fère’s - _my_ (I had to accustom myself to that) - mother.

Her name had been Adele de Bragelonne. That is all I managed to learn of her, history being much less generous with preserving the memories of wives than husbands. I wondered whether young Olivier had loved her as much as I loved my own mother. Or had she loved him as much as my mother had loved me? Eirene should have hated me, indeed, and counted me an inconvenience, for she had been dismissed from the temple of Poseidon for her trouble of bearing me. But my Father had been in one of his kind moods, and made sure that my mother and I were not left unattended at the mercy of mortals. All of Greece had been my playground, all her gods had been my playmates, and I saw my mother die of very advanced age, rocked into Thanatos’ embrace with the smile of pride because her son would never age. Well, thanks to a stroke of my sword, Olivier de La Fère would now also never age. _Forgive me, madame la comtesse,_ I addressed myself to her spirit alone, for I bore no regrets for taking her son the count’s life. _I will be a better son to you than he was_ , I promised as I entered her relations’ house.

Once proper greetings were exchanged, the viscount showed me into the rooms that would be mine for the duration of my stay.

“I was not sure that my letter had reached you,” he said.

“It had found me in London. I… had been traveling abroad for some time,” I replied with a courteous bow.

“You take after her side,” the old chevalier smiled upon me and gestured to a portrait above the fireplace behind me.

I had turned to follow the arc of his hand and beheld a fine depiction of a chevalier in full regalia. He wore upon his chest the ribbon of the Order of the Holy Spirit. I had slept through the entire sixteenth century, but my studies had informed me that this Order had been created by Henry III, one of the Valois kings. The Valois, from what I could tell, had made a deal with the Medicis rather than with the Nereids. A grave mistake that cost them the crown, no doubt.

“Is that…?”

“Your grandfather, of course. My older brother.”

“Ah.” I could see how upon cursory examination he could pass for my ancestor, about as much as the dead count and I may have passed for brothers. “I wish I had known him better,” I replied, not having to lie. 

“You should take the portrait,” the old viscount clapped me upon the shoulder. “There will be no one to care for it once I’m gone.”

I felt a strange pain take hold of my chest. He too was alone in this world. Who knew how many of his loved ones he had had to watch disappear while he remained, weathering the storm alone.

“How long will you stay, my young count?” he asked, his line-creased face becoming animated.

“As long as you would have me, M. le vicomte,” I emitted before I could think better of it. “I left a competent steward in charge back home, of course,” I added, quickly. “I’ll send him word.” Well, in either case, that was something for Grimaud to worry his pretty Grigori head over. The fate of the comté de La Fère was of very little concern to me, but I had to keep up pretenses.

Late that night, lying in my bed at the viscount’s château, the summer air suffocated me. The warmth and the moisture of the atmosphere felt oppressive, my lungs filled with the scent of nocturnally blossoming blooms. Everything about summer reminded me of _him_. My Aramis. Aramis in Varna, Aramis in Krakow, Aramis in Litochoro. The warmth of the air enveloped me like phantoms of his arms, the fragrance of the blooms was an echo of his sweet breath. I could no sooner inhale than my breath was taken from me by cruel memories of him.

Every fiber of my body rebelled against the absence of being needed, my blood curdled since it was no longer desired as sustenance for another. What use was it to me, in my own veins? And when had I become this? I, who had known nothing but slaughter and wrath my whole life, to be brought to such misery because I could no longer provide comfort to a revenant. 

I tore the sheet off my naked body, letting the summer air surround and take me. I shut my eyes and whispered his name. It died on my lips like an aborted prayer. Where was he, the demon I loved more than all the gods combined? What if he were here? Would he still want me? And would he reach out and touch me the way he did when we were last together, with trembling hands and voracious lips? I had no hope that he even remembered me anymore, nor would I blame him if time and winds had erased my name from his thoughts and my image from his mind’s eye. 

_But what if he…_ I shut my eyes and allowed my hand to travel down the length of my body, matted as it was with perspiration moistening my skin and hair. _What if he…_ I bit my lower lip and pretended the stabbing teeth had been his. _And then…_ I found my prick, which had lain dormant along with me for so long, and ran my fingers along my own shaft, gently at first, teasingly, the way he would have done. _Would he…_ I took myself in hand, my grip wrapping like a hot vise around my rapidly swelling member. I was gladdened that time and misuse had not atrophied it. But then again, Aramis had always had this effect on me. 

I removed my hand as if burned. It wouldn’t do to think of him like this. 

But it was useless, he had already been there, firmly ensconced in my heart and mind, and my entire body throbbed with the recollection of him, of his hands on my body, of his mouth, so ravenous and seeking against my lips, against my neck. Unbidden, my hand had moved back, locking into place, stroking myself harder, faster, _harder, faster_ , until I felt myself tighten and swell beyond all control. Until I covered my own abdomen with my emissions. Until his name died upon my lips again.

 _Father_ , I prayed to my progenitor who could not hear me from here, _help me. I know not what to do with myself._ But the old gods were far away again, far and asleep atop their eternal mountain.

***

I had been the viscount’s guest for a few weeks until restlessness took hold of me again. Yet for awhile, I had found a strange refuge beneath those chestnut trees and in the kindly eyes of my great-uncle. An almost monastic peacefulness had sustained me until I ran out of reading material at the château. My gracious host had even remarked that I had appeared to be losing the ‘accent of my travels’. I was settling comfortably into my frenchness, my _noblesse_ , and into my adoptive family.

“Let’s go join an army, Master,” my Grigori nagged.

“In due course, M. Grimaud,” I replied.

“If it’s war you want, I’m sure you could start one easily.”

“Oh, do shut up, Grimaud.”

He was right. Only in the baptism by blood would I ever regain my old self again. Except blood had lost meaning to me, became conflated with something else.

At last, one morning at dawn, as if called forth by an invisible trumpet, I bid Grimaud to saddle my horse and I had set off at a gallop along the long, winding shores of the Loire. I rode on for maybe an hour, losing track of time, until I could make out the towers of what must have been Amboise across the river. I had slowed my horse to a trot and rode along the idyllic rural landscape until I came upon a copse of weeping willows in a picturesque formation. I thought of Ophelia, whom Hamlet had driven into her watery grave. I thought of the water nymphs of the Loire, of the Ondines, the daughters of the sweet currents. I dismounted and approached the shore. One would have thought that after my repose under the waves I never would have wanted to set foot near water again. Perhaps Aramis had been right, though, perhaps I had the waters in my blood.

I stared into the rippled river, where it ran susurrating over the flat rocks, when a shadow fell upon me. I had not heard anyone approach. My hand, instinctively, alighted on the pommel of my sword. The shadow shifted, grew, transformed into something that sent shivers down my spine.

I spun around and drew my sword, ready to defend myself from whatever was about to attack me, but a cry froze inside my throat, turning quickly into a hoarse sob.

“ _Aramis_...”

***

**Amboise, 1617**

“ _Athos_!”

He was so close. Only a few paces separated me from him. I could touch him if I reached out. I stretched out my hand, I stretched out my arm, but struggle as I might he was just out of reach, his face half-averted, his shoulders slanted away from me. His face remained in shadows, obscured by a curtain of hair and death.

I opened my eyes with a gasp.

Beside me, a warm body stirred. “You’re awake.” A soft voice in my ear. “Bad dreams?”

“Marie,” I said. I couldn’t say anything else. I turned on my side and buried my face in her hair.

“That’s not the name you said before.” Her warm breath and lips against my chest, and I shivered.

“Forgive me.” I pulled her close and spoke into her hair. “I didn’t mean to-”

“Didn’t mean to dream of your dead lover?” Marie freed herself from my arms, pushed me on my back and leaned over me. Her hair cascaded down, a golden Jacob’s ladder that I followed with my gaze. “You surprise me, chevalier. Who doesn’t enjoy being haunted by memories of lost happiness.”

I smiled, and then I sighed and turned my face away from her to stare at the window with unseeing eyes. Marie’s fingers threaded through my hair and her lips brushed against my temple. “It wouldn’t do if you forgot him,” she said calmly. “Those stabs of pain when these memories return, they are good and necessary. They’re what makes you human,” she giggled like the girl that she was, and I couldn’t help but laugh with her.

“Verily, Mademoiselle, you are wise beyond your years,” I said, kissing the tips of her fingers. “I-” I hesitated. Marie knew about my death nightmares – how could she not? For more than one hundred and fifty years she and I had been sharing beds, for weeks, sometimes months at a time. I had become accustomed to spending my nights sleeping after Athos had been torn away from me: for night-time dreams of my former grave had been easier to bear than day-time awareness that he was gone. “I had not dreamed of him in a long time,” I confessed. “Only recently he has started to haunt me. I see his face, which I thought I had forgotten, almost every night.” I looked at her and kissed her white forehead. “Forgive me,” I said again. “I shouldn’t burden you with this.”

Marie sprawled over my chest, chin digging into my sternum, and threw a leg over my hip so that I could feel how wet she still was. “You never told me,” she said, “What did he look like?”

“Beautiful.” I closed my eyes and summoned the vision of his face, but, like in my dream, the elusive image faded as I tried to hold on to it.

“Describe him to me.” Marie’s voice was very gentle.

“Why?”

“I’d like to know. For when I try to picture it.”

“Picture what? Him?”

“You and him,” she said cheerfully.

I laughed. “Why would you do that?”

“Because you are beautiful, mon chevalier infernal. And if he is also, alors,” she giggled, “That will give me something to contemplate when we are apart.”

“He’s a god,” I said, laughing soundlessly into her hair. “His profile is like that of a Grecian statue. He’s got dark hair-”

“Like you.” Marie thrust her hips into me and then rolled off and propped her beautiful head on her hand, watching me with narrowed eyes and her catlike smile.

“And dark eyes. They are the colour of the deepest, richest mahogany. The colour of golden Armagnac in the sun,” I was getting into the spirit of it, and so was my body. “Like ebony in candlelight when desire sets them aflame. His gaze, Marie,” I told her, “is full of heathen insolence. So bold. As though he could read my souls.”

“Mmh,” Marie’s slim fingers were tapping out a pagan rhythm on my chest, which my heart was rapidly picking up. “You truly are a poet, chevalier. Can you pour forth such elegies about his mouth, I wonder?”

“His mouth-” My heart clenched and infinite sadness rushed through me. For I had loved his mouth – it was, perhaps, the most beloved part of his body. I had devoted months of my life worshipping it in thought and deed. “So finely cut,” I murmured. “So straight and stern in repose, with a smirk tucked in in one corner. So generous in passion. And his hands, Marie,” I took one of hers in mine and lifted it to my lips. “Come to think of it, his hands were my despair. The most elegant lines; slim, long fingers - and he took no care of them at all. I had to rub almond paste into his skin by force.” 

“The body of a Grecian statue?” Marie whispered, and her pretty finger danced across my lips and into my mouth. I curled my tongue around it and she sighed.

“Indeed, my astute nymph,” I spoke around her digit. “A sculpture of marble that came alive under my hands.”

“And under your mouth.” She pulled her hand back and pressed her lips to mine. “You, too, have a beautiful mouth, Aramis.”

She was lithe and supple under my hands, under my body as I rolled over and buried her beneath me. Younger than I’d ever seen her before, for she had been last reborn not seventeen years ago. Ever since we’d first met on Aegean shores, Marie made sure that we met when her current body was in full bloom. I’d never seen her a child, I’d never seen her old. The ancient bargain that the House of Rohan had struck with the nymphs of the Loire meant that a child of the waters was exchanged for a child of Rohan. Marie grew up with her human brothers and sisters as if she were a mortal herself. Once her youth faded, she would return to the river of rebirth with an infant at her breast.

“We must be careful,” I whispered as she wrapped her legs around my hips and pulled me in, the way she had done countless times before. “Your husband must never know...”

“I can’t wait to get married,” Marie sighed. “There is such liberty in being a wife, rather than a daughter. But don’t worry, Aramis.” The impish flames that gleamed in those maiden eyes were familiar and beloved. “He will never know that I’ve had lovers before him. And husbands,” she laughed. “Men believe what they want to believe – you know that better than anyone.” I lowered my head to kiss her throat, teasing the tender skin until laughter pearled from her lips.

***

I left her before cock-crow, gliding out of the house of her Amboise kinsfolk in the same fashion as I had glided in: silent like death, and leaving much less visible trails in my wake. Marie and I were to meet again in Paris, where she would remain Her Most Christian Majesty’s maid of honour until her marriage come September. It would be so much easier for us to meet after she was married, for the maids of honour were well guarded.

It had been Marie’s idea that I should enlist as a member of the royal guards. “I’ve educated you to be an honnête homme, ma petite créature de la nuit,” she had told me as I was leaving her one night, wrapping myself in my dark cloak that Athos would have deemed very befitting of his little flittermouse. I flashed my fangs at her, and she giggled, unafraid as ever, and continued: “Your accent is almost as pure as that of a true Frenchman, one born and raised in Tours. Your haughty demeanour, your lyrical eloquence, your diabolic charm – oh, you will be a most welcome addition to the literary gatherings in Paris! I will effect an invitation to Madame de Rambouillet’s hôtel for you as soon as I’ll get the chance. It will be a good place for us to be officially introduced.”

“You’ve got it all planned out, my Athena,” I bowed to her and made my cloak billow around me just a bit. “Your ability to plan ahead never fails to impress me.”

“Oh, that is an acquired skill,” she waved an elegant hand. “I’ve lived among humans for many centuries. As a woman, I have to employ my mind rather than my body to while away the time. I wouldn’t be averse to a little bit of adventure that you men enjoy, but alas! dressing up as a boy to spend the days on horseback in the company of your brother and his friends is tolerated only until a certain age.”

“I am sure you would still make the most admirable cavalier, if you put your mind to it.” I seized her around her waist and pulled her towards me for a parting kiss. “Perhaps that is something that I can teach you.”

“Perhaps,” she said, narrowing her eyes and curling her lips in a saucy smile, ever the coquette. “But first, you have to come up with a cover story for when you’re joining the royal guards. The good thing about them is that noblemen are known to join under false names and pretences – men who have something to hide, men who wish to protect the family name. All you will have to do is allude to a vaguely dishonourable occurrence in your past and nobody will ask questions.”

“Oh, I think I know just the thing,” I told her and she beamed in delight.

I thought of that night and that conversation as I set off towards Paris. After I had left Marie, I’d gone back to the wayside inn where I had taken lodgings for the duration of my stay in Amboise. While settling my bill, I contemplated adding something more substantial to my breakfast than the thin wine and inferior cheese that I had been served. After some deliberation, I decided against it: none of the men here looked like they were worth the trouble. Soon, I would have the king’s guards at my disposal.

But even more than these considerations, something else beckoned me towards Paris. I had felt restless for a while now, and I had caught myself more than once looking out towards the east, as if I expected a messenger to turn up on my doorstep. Yet despite the feverish restlessness that had me in its grip, I slowed down my horse after I had crossed the river. I turned around and cast one last glance at the church spire that towered above the roofs of the houses. This little town on the shore of the Loire would always be filled with the most delightful memories. Marie, I thought as I continued on my way, Marie… Athos. Why was I thinking of him all of a sudden? Marie had asked me about him last night. I had dreamed of him. The proud line of his jaw when he measured me with that look of heathen insolence. The straight-backed stance. The slant of his shoulders. If I just reached out, I could touch him.

I dismounted. I began to walk. Following my shadow, which led me across a meadow towards a grove of weeping willows, whose long-fingered arms drooped forlornly towards the waters above which they wept.

The man didn’t move. The slant of his shoulders, I knew it well. I wasn’t nervous. The coolness of combat had descended over me, I was clear-headed as if amidst battle. My stride didn’t falter. He didn’t know I was stalking him until my shadow fell upon him: a bringer of death, but not to him, never to him. He whirled around, hand on sword, and we stood face to face as the world around us spun to a standstill.

Around me was nothing. I had found the peaceful _nihil_ that I had so long craved, yet it was suffused with light. Amidst it – nothing. Nothing but his face, his eyes, and the cry that tore from his throat and that tore through my heart.

“ _Aramis!_ ”

***

I closed my eyes and counted to five. I opened them.

“Aramis..,” I repeated, my voice faltering, begging the mirage before me not to disappear.

“Athos. _Mon Dieu_!” The mirage spoke with his voice and my sword fell from my hand. He took a step towards me, both arms reaching out as if to grasp my shoulders, but halting, hesitant. “You’re alive.”

“You’re… _you_.”

I took another step towards him, into the circle of his arms which closed around me. My forehead touched his and I shut my eyes again, inhaling the scent of his skin. The scent of Aramis was under there, somewhere, buried beneath the pomades and lavender and centuries of sleeping away from my embrace. I felt his arms tremble around me and a faltering breath escaped him as he, no doubt, inhaled my own essence. 

I opened my eyes and brought my own trembling hands to his face. “Aramis,” I repeated, incapable of another word, of another thought. He looked… a little older than the beautiful boy I had lost in the Aegean, on the outside. On the inside, I could feel the press of centuries against the pores of his flawless skin. Oh, he had lived without me, he had grown. But he was still so beautiful that I had neglected to breathe.

My eyes burned. I blinked and two large tears ran down my cheeks.

***

He dropped to his knees, resistless was his strain. _Athos_. Half pulled me in, half lured me in, and we sank down entwined. “Aramis,” he whispered into my neck. My skin, my muscles, my very bones were shuddering under the touch of his breath. “ _Aramis_.” That voice. That _voice_. I had heard it call out to me, heard it across time and space. It was the benediction he had choked out that night in Varna. Long before I had lost him. Long before I had loved him.

But no. I had always loved him. I had never stopped. Centuries meant nothing. Decades of going through life without thinking of him meant nothing. I had outwaited the sea.

He was shaking in my arms, crying perhaps, for I felt puffs of breath jab into the skin above my collar. My eyes were dry, my souls were full of a divine light. I had been a Christian knight and a warrior monk, but never had I felt this close to God. This, _this_ , was the true Sacrament. I tugged off my glove with my teeth, for I would not let go of him even for a second, and passed my hand over his face, over his scalp, felt for the beloved contours under hair that was cut according to latest fashion. He was dressed in velvet and brocade – I could see that whoever he was now, he was a man of affluence.

Of course he was. He was the son of Zeus. He was a God among men, and no centuries of – what? what had happened to him? Whatever it was, it had not changed him, for he was still the same demigod of yore, whom the tides of time could not shake. Unmoved and immovable. Firm, unyielding, eternal.

***

I wept in his arms, the very touch of his hand upon my skin unmanning me completely. I had been without him but a small number of years, insignificant in the scope of our separation. I had not, try as I might, had the opportunity to put him behind me yet. As he must have.

And yet. Here he was. Pressing me close instead of pushing me away. The beat of his heart was so strong it pulsated through my own body, and I had to chase away the thought of whose blood coursed through his veins. Whose hands had touched his skin. Where did the scent of lavender and rosewater come from? I wanted, _needed_ to reclaim him, yet I had not even pressed my lips to his yet.

I lifted my face from the curve of his neck, my hands gripping onto his embroidered doublet. “Aramis,” I whispered again, “Tell me you’re still mine. Tell me or I shall die a thousand deaths.”

His mouth twitched and his nostrils flared. And then he traced the path of my tears with his finger, from chin all the way back up to my eye, and scooping the moisture up, brought it to his own lips.

***

_Heaven_. No. Not yet. This wasn’t heaven, the salt on my tongue. The taste of him, diluted in his tears, like a whiff of a beloved perfume. It brought back memories crashing through the ramparts of my mind and I groaned.

So many years. I was twice as old now as I had been when Athos had left me. Not that one could see that, because my appearance had changed but little. Would he- did he- No. He still thought me beautiful. I could tell by the way he looked at me. Was I still his? I’d never been anybody else’s.

“I am,” I told him. I couldn’t stop shaking. My heart, accustomed to beating on its own, was struggling to fall into the familiar rhythm, guided by his pulse. I would have to seal our covenant anew, but not yet. Not yet.

Everything would be too much. Haphazard memories swirled inside my head, tumbling madly to the surface without any sense or structure. His blood used to blind my mind: I knew that now, even though I had forgotten it for so long. The first time I drank from him, the first time he touched me: the shock had been as great as if he had touched raw flesh with the tip of a red-hot iron. I wouldn’t feel anything, until later, when sensation came flooding back in. “You were gone, Athos,” I told him. “I-” missed you. Died without you. Was cast into utter darkness. (Where there had been a gnashing of teeth indeed, and I snorted with sudden laughter.)

Athos froze, but I pulled him close and pressed my forehead to his. “I didn’t know where you were.”

***

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “God, Aramis, I’m so sorry.” My lips brushed gently against the contour of his cheekbone and I felt his lashes flutter beneath the barely palpable kiss. Just like in my English nightmare, I was afraid of drowning in an ocean of my own making.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he shook his head side to side against mine. But he had been wrong about that. It _was_ my fault. Wasn’t it? For having ever been Discord’s chosen and bearing her banners with such pride.

I held on to the back of his neck, my fingers coming to life wrapping along the familiar ligaments, the downy softness of the hair there, along his nape.

“I am sorry,” I repeated. “I went to a place where you couldn’t follow me.” My words choked me. “I…” _I thought you had forgotten me._ “Gods, please, I need to kiss you.”

And without waiting for him to either press on or pull away, I tipped his chin up with gentle fingers and let my lips trace the contours of his own. His mouth parted beneath mine and a soft moan flew, like an angel, through my own opened lips. I felt it echo in the back of my own throat. And then I pressed forth, sealing my lips over his, losing myself in the heat of his mouth, in the feel of our tongues coming together to strive for dominance as if centuries had never separated us. I might have started to weep again, so lost was I in the perfect harmony of his lips, his breath, his teeth. His hands tangled and tugging at my hair. His teeth pulling on my swollen lower lip. I drank in his kisses like the breath of life. I did not let go until I felt his fangs drop against my tongue and then he pushed me away, panting and disheveled, and looking just as drunk and devastated as I felt.

***

Olympian ambrosia. Heavenly manna. The nectar of the gods. My head spun and my eyes burned. Had I ever cried, this would be the moment to pour out my want in my tears. To cleanse myself from that desire that was as livid inside me as the flames of Purgatory. I wanted. This. I wanted this, _him_ , so much. The craving had never stopped.

His kisses had left scorch marks upon my lips, just like they had left scorch marks upon my souls. He looked at me as if the touch of my mouth would guide him towards salvation.

I retracted my fangs, struggling against the craving. Struggling against my nature that urged me to throw myself on him and to devour him, like I had devoured countless others. Like I used to devour him, centuries ago, when he was mine and I his, and nothing else mattered. His face. His _eyes_. If _he_ was intoxicated on _me_ – what was I? On the brink of losing my senses.

“Athos,” I said, startling at the sound of my own voice. “I know what you want. But I… can’t. Not now. Not like this.”

He smiled. And oh God, that smile, that sad, ancient smile. The tempest within my breast swept my breath away and stopped my heart. Athos reached out and touched my face with trembling fingers. “I know,” he whispered. “Later. We have time.”

***

_We have time_ , I said, and for the first time since the ocean vomited me out, that thought hadn’t terrified me. Now that he was back at my side, the future no longer held for me the looming spectre of desperation. For the past two years, time had been my enemy, my immortality a burden, but now…. _Now._

“What now?” I asked, my hand trailing over his cheek, brushing the delicate curve of the shell of his ear, each part of him just as divine and precious as I had made it out to be in the shrine of my memories.

His eyes, already naturally so dark, seemed swallowed up by the blackness of his pupils, as if he had dropped belladonna into his orbs. I had begun to forget how it felt to be desired the way he had desired me. And I had been such a fool not to look for him. I hadn’t deserved him before, I felt even less deserving of his love now.

“Hold me,” he whispered and his eyes fell from my face to my hands. My hands which had found their way slowly down the lines of his arms and rested against his wrists, like the first night when he had come to me in Wallachia. I thought again of how deceptively delicate his bones appeared.

I reeled him in again by his wrists, just as I had then, only without the ravening desire that ruled us when first we met. “My love,” I muttered against his temple, as my arms came around him, holding onto his body like a life raft that I could have used in my aimless wafting through the world, always adrift. I let my eyes fall close. I breathed again. “Forever.”


	2. Chapter 2

Eventually, our besotted silence gave way to idle talk. I had told him of my great-uncle, but not of how I came to assume my current name. He had told me of Malta, but not of whence he was coming when he encountered me. There was much we left unsaid, but we had time again, we had each other. I had not wanted to separate from his side and would have happily fried to a crisp under the July sun had Aramis not stirred from my embrace.

“We must part for now, my love,” he spoke and my heart, which had already tethered itself to the rhythm of his own, beat in outrage against the cage of my ribs. “Not for long,” he added quickly, pressing his lips against mine in a chaste but lingering kiss. “There are… I’ve some responsibilities to attend to. And you… You must say your farewells in Blois if we are to depart together.”

To depart. Yes. We hadn’t spoken of much, but I had asked him about Porthos. A question at which he laughed and in his devilishly mocking tone replied, “You wished to know first if I’m still yours and second whatever happened to Porthos? Well, have no fear, lover. Your cousin is alive and thriving in the Languedoc. He’s found himself a young and insatiable widow.”

I had never been to the South of France, and it seemed as good a destination as any. We had decided to set out on the very next morrow, not seeing any reason to tarry in the Loire Valley any longer. It seemed that our propensity to collide and flee together had not faded over the centuries of separation.

“I was… expected in Paris,” Aramis muttered, “and I must make my excuses.” I narrowed my eyes, wondering to whom he could be so beholden as to require the making of excuses. Such as the excuses he was making at that moment to me.

“You’re afraid to be alone with me,” I said.

“No, it’s not that!” he protested quickly. Perchance too quickly.

“Perhaps you are no longer free to love me,” I said, choking on the words and their sentiment.

“I will show you _how_ very free to love you I am,” he reassured me with his lips pressed against mine again. “Tonight. I will come for you at your great-uncle’s château.”

“You will find me?”

“I always find you.”

I had returned to Bragelonne with the air of a man possessed. I tore through the château without seeking out my great-uncle and headed straight for my bedroom, collapsing onto the mattress face-down. My head spun from my blood returning to its regular course in my veins, my entire body buzzed with joy and trepidation.

I heard a throat being cleared behind me.

“Can I help M. le comte in some way?” my solicitous familiar asked.

“Pack my bags, Grimaud,” I mumbled into the bed. “I want to be ready to set off on the morrow.”

“Are we joining an army?” he asked, unable to contain his glee.

“He’s back,” I exhaled, flipping over and fixing my eyes on the ceiling, though in reality they were fixed somewhere much further away. “He’s here.”

“Who, Monsieur?”

“Aramis.”

“Oh.”

That sour ejaculation made me leap up off the mattress in the heat of rage. “What exactly do you presume by that, you little monster?”

“Only that in the thousands of years that I have served you, Master, I have never seen you as undone by anyone the way you are by that revenant. Hadrian himself was not this distraught over the loss of Antinous!”

“Well,” I huffed, “That is just gross hyperbole! Hadrian was _far_ more out of his mind with grief. And… and… really, you just mentioned Antinous to distract me, I’m on to you, old gargoyle!”

“Fine, go back to him. Perhaps he can finally break your heart, and we can get this Greek tragedy over with!”

I slapped him across the face then for such audacity. “My very young and impertinent M. Grimaud,” I hissed. “Am I or am I not your Kyrios?”

“As long as your Father wishes it,” he replied, grudgingly.

“And does my Father still wish it?”

“It would appear so, Master.”

“In that case, I bid you to mind your tongue, lest I tear it out of your mouth with my own bare hand.” He looked as if he was contemplating a reply. He opened his mouth and shut it again, no doubt giving credence to my threats. “There is _nothing_ you can say that will keep me from his side. And as for you, you will treat him the same way you should treat me. Which is to say with _respect_ and deference.” Grimaud emitted a demonstrative sigh. “And you will wash the blood out of the sheets without complaint!” He rolled his eyes at me. “I will gouge out your eyes too, if that’s what it takes!”

“I only roll my eyes, Master, because I love you,” the Grigori pointed out in a fit of sincerest exasperation.

“I know. I love you too.” I hung my head in shame. “But I’m _in love_ with Aramis.”

Oh, so very disgustingly in love. I wondered how my heart was capable of such a depth of emotion, of such constancy. I loved him all the more because he had not forgotten me, exponentially more because he loved me still. 

“And he _will_ be the death of you,” Grimaud sighed dropping his arms. “Your true death, not this hiatus you’ve recently returned from, your brain still full of kelp and shrimp, no doubt.”

“Ah, well, that’s what my Father keeps you in my employ for,” I tried to laugh it off, ignoring his insinuations and blatant effrontery, and then I added, “I need him. Please, Grimaud. Just shut up and come with us to Languedoc.”

“Of course, Master.”

“I mean it. Don’t speak.”

His bow was imbued with as much insolence as his reluctant silence permitted, and then he scurried out of my room to make arrangements.

I fell back onto the bed again and ran my hands over my face, groaning with impatience. I cast an accusatory look out the window, where in the summer skies the sun was taking far too long to run its setting course. I knew my flittermouse would only come for me under the cover of darkness, just as he did the first time he snuck into my tent, intent on taking my life. And took my heart instead.

***

My departure for Paris imminent, I was sat in the little cabinet that had been put at my disposal in the château d'Amboise, occupied with writing a letter to my fiancé. It was a matter requiring immense mental effort. Scientists knew about the anatomy of blood vessels, about the revolution of the heavenly spheres, and why the needle of the compass points north. Yet the greatest minds, the most learned philosophers had not yet understood the powers governing the soul of a man who professed himself to be as much in love as the Duke de Luynes was with me. I could have asked Aramis for advice, who professed himself very much in love indeed, but my delicacy of feeling prevented me from seeking guidance for my intercourse with my future husband from my lover.

I sat with my spirit adrift and my head in the clouds, emitting a sigh every now and then. Rather than devoting myself like a dutiful bride to the task of drafting an epistle to my affianced one, my thoughts strayed like wayward kittens to days long gone, when I had been guest in the château d’Amboise by invitation of my kinswoman Anne of Brittany. Duchess of Bretagne and Queen of France, Anne had been betrothed to more men than I cared to remember. I wondered if she ever hunched over empty pages called upon to write to a prince, archduke or king with whom she was supposed to tie dynastic bonds, while her mind dwelled with the obstinacy of an ass on the way a lover’s hands had tangled in her hair like brambles only the night before. Or if she, busy with affairs of state, considered potential husbands a nuisance that had to be endured like chickenpox for the sake of safeguarding one’s future survival.

My husband-to-be was neither king nor prince. He was more than that: the Constable of France, the second-in-command only to the King. My love for him was that of a bride to her betrothed – regulated by rules of conduct that made it impossible to live the passion that I was supposed to feel for my husband. Once we were married, I would be permitted to discover the secrets of my own body under his tutelage. It was most tiresome, and another sigh escaped me and fluttered under the ceiling on the wings of a turtledove. It was a fine line between the coquette and the cocotte. I knew the language of passion well and considered it one of my greatest accomplishments that in my current role I contrived to paint myself quite the virginal, albeit scandalously flirtatious, bride in my correspondence to my fiancé.

Yet inspiration, fickle friend that she was, had deserted me that day. Bleak sheets lay before me on the bureau, and a gigantic inkwell, black to the brim, waited patiently and peeked with a beady eye if my pen should dunk its beak into it like a heron. I waited for that glorious moment when a fully-fledged spectre of love eternal, love pure would spring from my tortured head, like Pallas Athena had sprung from the noble, abundantly bearded head of Zeus.

Rather than the spectre of love eternal, the femme de chambre rolled into my cabinet, bearer of the wondrously fragrant name of La Lunaire. I said “rolled”, and I’m not going to take it back. The only difference between La Lunaire and a cannon was that, rather than being dragged into position by powerful bullocks, the former steamed ahead to her destination on her own accord. Her physique was that of a trebuchet, her voice that of a culverin, and the latter one’s terrifying habits complemented the frightful appearance. She looked down at me and intoned in a voice so black that pitch dripped off it in heavy drops upon the Persian carpet.

“A visitor, Demoiselle.”

Anyone unfamiliar with the outrageous habits of that siege-gun would have opened the gates of Hell by chastising her for her insolence. That delightful member of heavy artillery had to be treated with haughty composure, with impassive patience, and with the clemency befitting of a philosopher. For the simple reason that the lunatic creature was panting for a pretence to instigate an inferno of wrathful reproaches and helpless tears, which she would bear with the mien of a martyr and in the certain knowledge that a lady who had lost her countenance and her composure in the most humiliating manner would subsequently be consumed with guilt and shame. Her hostile attitude stemmed from – what else! – disappointed love. Many, many moons ago, she had lost a lover to a faithless friend. Since that fateful dies irae, dies illa, the world had indeed dissolved in ashes. La Lunaire’s soul grew spines like a hedgehog and cultivated a deep and generously bestowed hatred of young women in love and young men in any state of emotion.

Acquainted with those deep, dark secrets, I spoke to her as if I was addressing an innocent songbird rather than a vicious siege weapon. I realised instantly that a young person of undetermined sex was requesting the pleasure of seeing me. Fortunately, the gods had blessed me with a quick wit.

“A visitor.”

“So I said,” rumbled the heavy artillery and looked at me lugubriously. It was La Lunaire’s duty to announce the names of my visitors to me, yet it was a duty that I had to enforce every day anew. Alas, I did not possess Aramis’ ability to bewitch my interlocutor to do my bidding, no questions asked.

“Would that be a visitor I wish to see?” I inquired, and met with a glance that told me in unmistakable terms that La Lunaire would not presume to make an assumption in respect to my wishes.

I heaved a skyward sigh. An impatient woman, unversed in the twisted mysteries of life, would have seized a pistol in an attempt to put an end to La Lunaire’s life with two well-aimed shots. But such an impulsive action would only result in two balls ricocheting from her skin as if from a hippopotamus, while she would stretch down the inexperienced fool with one potent glare.

The battle of wits with the pig-headed domestic, alas, did not amuse me that day as it often did. I was about to leave for Paris on the morrow, the letter to the Duke remained to be written, and the memory of Aramis’ hands on my bare skin kept me on edge. I was not in the mood for game-playing.

“Send them away,” I said curtly and saw with delight the gleam of disappointment on La Lunaire’s eyes. She bowed, turned on her heels and rolled off.

You may wonder why a servant like that had remained in my family’s employ. Well then: in that age of discovery and science, when old rites died away and the old gods were no longer venerated, it had become increasingly more difficult to find a servant devoted enough to help convey infants of the House of Rohan to their watery cradle in the waves of the Loire delta. Whereas La Lunaire, entrusted with the task of throwing babies into the river, did not bat an eyelid, and it was she to whom I was indebted for my latest rebirth.

The moment I had returned to my desk, the door banged open. The tapestries billowed, the door snapped shut, I jumped to my feet. Aramis stood in the middle of the cabinet, his face white, his eyes wild. For a brief moment I feared that he had slaughtered the dreadful Cerberus, until I heard the groan of her steps from the antechamber. No, he had not killed her. His ways were much more subtle.

I smiled at him, but my smile wilted, and then he spoke.

“He’s back.” His voice was such as I’d never heard it before, not even in the throes of ecstasy. He was passionate, my demon lover, but he was cold.

He was not being cold now. His eyes, his face were brimming over with emotion. The moment he became aware of what I read upon his usually illegible countenance, he threw himself at my feet and pressed his brow into my lap. “He’s back,” he whispered, as my hand came up mechanically to stroke his hair.

I was glad of his suppliant position, for it gave me time to rearrange my own features, which had slipped out of my control for a moment or two. I did not ask who “he” was. There was only one “he” capable of unmanning Aramis like that.

When he finally raised his head and raised himself to his feet again, his face had regained its customary hieroglyphic expression, notwithstanding the gleam in the depths of his black eyes.

“How?” My eloquence had evaporated under the suspense that was pressing down on me. “When?”

“I do not know,” he said. “He had been trapped. The sea released him. He’s living in Blois.”

“In Blois?” I bit my tongue, for I detested people who parrot the last thing their interlocutor said. “That’s a short ride away.”

“One hour.” Aramis, too, was less articulate than I had ever known him – save for our very first conversation, when he was half-dead and delirious with fever. He shrugged, looking painfully young all of a sudden. “He’s been restored to me.”

“I’m happy for you,” I said, uncertain if I spoke the truth. Aramis looked at me sharply. “Truly,” I reiterated as I took his hand in mine. Even through his glove I could feel that his fingers were cold as death. “The sea had taken him from you, and the sea had returned him. Sometimes, the waves are merciful.”

The slim fingers twitched in my grip. “Are they?” A crooked smile twisted his mouth. “Is that what your kin consider mercy, Marie?” He freed his hand and rubbed his forehead like a man in the grasp of dark thoughts. “Stealing the most precious thing in your life and returning it when you’ve learned to live without it? Returning it damaged?” He was smiling a thin, cruel smile. “Perhaps I should give thanks to the gods of the sea,” he said, sarcasm dripping from every word. “Offer a sacrifice. The old gods like sacrifice, don’t they?”

I had taken a step back and spoke with my chin held high. “Are you blaming me for what the sea did, chevalier?”

He stood completely still, like an alabaster statue and just as cold. “I do not. But you can’t deny that your gods delight in taking human life.”

“And your god does not?” I was not about to remind him of the death of the firstborn, nor of any other massacre performed in the name of the One God. He knew about them better than I did.

“As punishment,” he said. “Not for personal amusement.”

“Perhaps it was punishment,” I shot back.

Aramis looked taken aback. “Punishment for what? What had we ever done to your gods?”

“You had spilled blood in the sea and painted the waters red.” I doubted that the gods had cared much about the slaughter of crusaders and pirates. But I wasn’t going to let Aramis get away with it. He got his lover back and was insulting my ancestry. He had to be reined in. “You are like me, Aramis, a pagan creature in your own right. Don’t you ever forget that.”

He was silent for the span of several heartbeats, and my anger began to evaporate. I took a step towards him, and, as he didn’t recoil, another one. “Is he damaged?” I asked.

“He is brittle.”

I lifted my hand to his face and cupped his cheek, watching his lashes flutter shut as the familiar expression of tender submission crept upon his features. “Go to him,” I told him, still uncertain how I felt about the return of the mysterious lover, who had hitherto been the hero of legends rather than a man of flesh and blood. My own lovers and husbands had always been real and human, and Aramis had never shown any indication that he was jealous of any of them. They had been mortal.

A part of me feared the green-eyed serpent that might yet squeeze its venom into my veins. Another part of me rejoiced. It had been my idea that Aramis should join the royal guards in Paris – an idea born after a night in which Aramis’ passion for me had erupted with tenfold force and had rendered me senseless. I enjoyed drawing up plans how to meet Aramis inconspicuously; how to contrive communication with him, how to exchange letters, tokens and promises. I wanted him near, yet the nearer he came, the more I feared the consequences of our entanglement. I was the ebb where he was the flood. A lover to whom he was devoted would help us rein in our affaire de cœur; he would be the dam against which the most tempestuous waves would break.

And yet, I was not prepared to lose Aramis just yet to a man who had come back from the dead. The power I had over him was palpable and real.

My thumb brushed his cheekbone, my fingertips dipped into his hair. Aramis opened his eyes and saw me smile. “There isn’t time,” I said, aware that he was powerless to resist the challenge.

Aramis’ eyes gleamed. The finely-cut lips parted to reveal teeth like white corals. “I’m not expected until midnight,” he said, sank down to his knees and pressed his mouth into my lap.

***

The château d’Amboise was one of dozens of castles threaded like rosary beads along the silver ribbon of the Loire. When I left Marie for the second time that day, not like a thief in the night but like one who had committed daylight robbery, the sun had passed its zenith. In its golden glare, green vineries luxuriated on the slopes. It was the hottest hour of the day, when all living creatures hide in shades and shadows. Not a bird stirred, not a leaf. The silence was so absolute that I heard it ringing in my ears, as if the sunbeams that poured down to Earth chimed in the air. The only noises as I rode down the path were limestones crunching under my horse’s hooves and the susurrus of the river.

One hour to Blois. One hour. I had promised Athos to come to him tonight. How many hours till midnight? I glanced at the cerulean sky and lowered my eyes again before the white-hot face of Helios. My nature rebelled against arriving in broad daylight. No, I would have to find him in the dark, in his rooms (in his bed – and oh how my loins burned at the thought of him in his bed) like I had found him on the Wallachian battlefield, more than two centuries ago.

The capricious Loire meandered through a meadow and slipped into a tunnel of trees. I steered my horse down the bank, dismounted, fetched the canteen from my saddle bag and drank until I felt wine course through my veins like blood. Tonight, I would be drinking nectar. I began to disrobe; my hat, my gloves, my doublet, my shirt… The sun beams prickled on my skin and a breeze rose from the water, like soft warm breath that raised goosebumps on my arms and neck. The Loire gathered me in her cold embrace – much colder than that of her daughter, which I had left not long ago.

I washed Marie’s scent off my fingers and lips. It was no good, she had soaked in through my pores and was under my skin, even though I had never drunk her blood. I had remained faithful to the iron rule which I had imposed upon myself and to which I had faithfully adhered, like a Catholic to Friday Fast. The blood of women, the blood of the weak and the frail was safe from me. What I craved was…

What I craved was Athos.

I clenched my teeth and threw myself into the waves, fighting against the current and winning.

My body and soul were pointing towards Blois like the needle of a compass points north. My mind and soul trembled. So many years. So many centuries. He had changed, and I… I had learned to love without him. He had promised me he’d never die, and I had believed him. I had entrusted my happiness, my faith, my life to him, and all had shattered like glass.

I pulled myself ashore and lay panting in the grass. My fingers were white and cold and Marie’s scent no longer clung to them. Tonight, my skin would soak up Athos’ scent, and my very bones shuddered at the thought.

I raised myself to my knees, clasped my hands and bent my head. I prayed I wouldn’t change my mind.

***

I did not. My mind was like a knife when I glided into the grounds of the château de Bragelonne on the silent wings of death. The orchard walls were high and hard to climb: for anyone but me. The night’s cloak hid me from their eyes: from anyone’s but his. A light appeared in one of the windows, the faint flicker of a candle. A curtain billowed, a window opened, and the man I loved stepped onto the balcony, pale and silent like a ghost. His gaze didn’t search. His body didn’t startle. His eyes met mine, and then he lifted his face to the moon, which hung like an Ottoman crescent low above our heads. The mask of night was on his face, yet I fancied I could read it well enough, and what I read robbed me of my breath.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, he was looking at me. He watched me slink closer, watched me reach for cornices and for ledges as I pulled myself up the wall as I had pulled myself ashore. His hand against mine, his fingers around mine, and he was tugging me over the balustrade and into his arms. We sank into each other as both our knees buckled under our combined weight.

“Aramis.” A soft whisper in my ear, like soft summer wind. He didn’t kiss me until the balcony door closed behind us, but then. Oh, then he shoved me backwards against the wall and thrust his entire body against mine. The hard lines, the firm muscles. The marble skin. I knew it all, my hands roved along the familiar planes and grooves. The arch of his ribs which heaved with frantic breaths. “ _Aramis!_ ” A growl this time, and I found myself thrown upon the bed and ravished by lips and teeth that were ravenous with frenzied hunger.

Cambric tore under our feverish hands. His tongue devoured my mouth and my nails scrambled over the dips and bulges of his muscles. I muttered a prayer into the damp skin above the arch of his collarbone and he gave thanks with his mouth fastened to the ridge of my jaw.

“I want you,” one of us panted. “Take me,” came the reply, and I did not know which was my voice and which his. 

Red lines criss-crossed his skin where I had dragged my nails and fangs over the marble. I had touched him everywhere that night; had wrapped my hand around his foot as I dipped my tongue in his navel and pushed my fingers between his lips. He clung to my shoulders, to my hair, to my words that I pressed into the shuddering muscles of his stomach and thighs and that flew up to him like prayers. We spoke, I don’t know of what. A liturgy, half-sighed, half-sung, as our bodies relearned the rhythm that they had never forgotten: it was in our blood.

“Aramis.” His breath was hot against my fingers. He turned his head and kissed my palm, and I trapped that kiss under my hand, pressing it into his cheek. He felt… thinner, more frail somehow, his cheekbone dug into my hand, uncushioned. Centuries in a watery prison had taken their toll, even though his body had been restored to its former magnificence and I worshipped it on my knees from my position between his spread thighs.

Perhaps I had changed, too. I had not yet been twenty when I first died, and I looked younger. For a long time, I had not been aware that my body grew older: I got accustomed to looking a boy, forever. Marie… I tightened my mouth around Athos’ cock and tasted the salt of the ocean. Marie had pointed out to me that I did age, albeit at a slow pace. “You have changed, chevalier,” she had told me one night, running her fingers over the line of my shoulder. “You’re broader than you used to be.”

And I was. As I spread atop Athos, one leg between his, his cock pressed up against mine, I realised that Marie had been right. My body had changed. Athos was looking at me with eyes that passion had rendered the colour of ebony. Did he notice it too? It didn’t appear to put him off, for his hands and mouth were as ardent as ever in their worship of me. I melted into him and kissed that generous mouth of which I could never get enough, and he opened up for me and swallowed my moans. His cock burned itself into my stomach and I reached down, reached between us and curled my fingers around it. Athos groaned, arched off the mattress, and thrust his tongue deep into my mouth. “Je-” _t’aime_ , I wanted to say. “Je t’adore,” was what I said, panted against the heat of his lips.

“Aramis.” My name on his lips, and nobody said it like he did. “ _Aramis_.” His cock in my hand, thick and infinitely hard. I lifted my hand to my mouth and licked across my palm, and then I gripped him again, a slippery slide along his length that made his hips jerk into mine.

“Do you want to-” I lifted myself off him just enough to look at him. His eyes, wild with desire, and his mouth, panting for me like I was panting for him. “Like this?” I demonstrated with a tug of my hand.

Athos was staring at me like a man possessed. And then, his arm around my neck, yanking me down into a scalding kiss, and his body moved beneath mine, lifting me off effortlessly, shifting, rolling, and Athos was spreading himself before me, one knee pulled in, his hips slanted, his arse mine to take. My breath arrested at the sight, and I collapsed over him, burying my moan between his shoulderblades.

“Athos,” I whispered into the damp skin, kissing the rippling muscles with my teeth and tongue. I reached out blindly for the vial that I had spotted on the table and that I was sure Athos had not put there by accident. Expensive floral scent wafted as I unstoppered it, and I poured warm oil generously over Athos’ skin. It glistened in candlelight, and he pulled in his knee even more, thrusting his arse up, into my hand, and I flattened my palm against the muscles that shuddered under my touch. I shoved my hips into him, rubbing my cock against his oiled skin. His body was taut with tension, muscles coiled and hard, and I licked across his shoulders, nuzzled into the side of his neck, sought his mouth with mine, even as my hand kneaded the firm flesh of his arse.

Beneath his skin, his blood was thundering through his veins, calling out to me, setting the marble skin aflame. I dug my fingers into his flesh and he hissed. I slotted my wrist between his thighs, into the cleft of his arse, and he groaned. I snaked my hand beneath him, trailed my oiled fingers over his testicles and closed them around his cock. His thighs parted for me, I threw one leg over his and we lay entangled, his hand in my hair, my mouth in his hair, our moans, sweat and heartbeats intermingling. He was fucking himself into my hand, rubbing his arse against my forearm, as I fucked myself against his slippery skin.

“Aramis,” his voice broke. “Let go.” Gentle fingers around my wrist motioned my hand away from his cock. “Not like this. Not yet.”

I kissed him, and I could almost taste his blood under the thin skin of his lips. My hand slithered back up, fingers dragging through his cleft, and I pushed one digit into him. Athos cried out into my mouth, the tight ring clenched around my finger and my fangs dropped. The tip of his tongue probed the sharp points as he held me in place by my hair. He was so tight, for a moment I feared that it wouldn’t work, that no amount of oil would be enough to render him open for my cock, but then he shifted, pulled himself up to his knees, pushed his arse against my hand, and my finger slipped in more deeply, more easily. I held still and let him fuck himself on me, let him get used to the sensation of being filled again. I never suspected that he might have had other lovers since his rebirth: not like this. This was just for me.

The call of the blood that throbbed through his veins and muscles was getting ever stronger, ever stronger. I felt it in the pulse around my finger, and I pushed myself up, crawling on top of him, my chest on his back, enveloping him with my body and gluing myself to him from temple to toe. When I twisted my wrist and changed the angle, he gasped and shuddered, and his blood boiled to the surface where my lips pressed to the side of his neck. My fingers were sliding in so much more easily now; the oil dripped down my hand, coated the insides of his thighs as he spread himself for me. I was desperate to bury myself in that slick heat, but I wanted him to be out of his mind with lust before pushing into him. “Athos?” I muttered against the corner of his mouth. “Athos, tell me what you want.”

A harsh exhale, his hand clenched in my hair, and then one word, just one word that shot to my heart: “You.”

I groaned, my rhythm faltered, I scrambled atop him, slipped between his legs, dragged my hand down his spine as I straightened my back, and watched him as he raised himself to his knees for me. He gasped when I pulled my hand back, leaving him open and vulnerable and oh so ready for me. My breath stopped, my heart stopped, and my cock screwed itself into Athos. I held him open with my thumbs, soaked up the shiver that rose from the marrow of his bones through my fingertips and felt it run through me, turning my own bones to water.

All the way, I fucked myself all the way in, shoved my hips into him and draped myself over him, digging my thumb into his armpit and curling my fingers around his shoulder to hold him in place. “I want to-” my throat was dry. I parted my lips, parted my teeth over the vein throbbing in his neck. “May I?”

“Take it.” Athos turned his head and pressed his lips to my forehead. “It’s yours. Aramis. I’m yours.”

I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by the words, the sound of his voice. The way his body stretched and clamped around me. Could I do it? Would the taste of his blood flood my mouth and clog my senses? Would it overpower me and drag me down like the waves of the Aegean had overpowered us both and dragged us down? We had survived the sea. Would we survive us?

“Take me,” Athos snarled, tugging at my hair. My head spun, my fangs tore through his skin, our Eucharist commenced. Divine blood, nectar of the gods. I growled as I drove deeply into him, with my cock and my teeth. So long. So long without him. I was intoxicated already, and then Athos threaded his fingers through mine, pulled my hand to his lips and sucked in my fingers filthily.

He filled me with his blood as I filled him with my flesh. A sacred ritual. Our Eucharist. 

***

Before Odysseus had found Achilles on Skyros, he had found me on Thira. While subsequent accounts of Odysseus’ character vary widely depending on whether you speak to a Greek or a Roman, one thing everyone agreed on was that the King of Ithaca was no fool. He had been tasked with delivering a prophesied demigod to the Achaeans and he figured he would hedge his bets by dragging me off with him: the wrong demigod was preferable to no demigod at all.

He hadn’t only dragged me off to the war in Troy, he’d also managed to lure me to his bed. And for a number of years, I was perfectly content to that lot in life for the honor of having a King as my erastes. I was mortal then, and so young. Despite my innate willfulness and propensity to rebellion, Odysseus found me to be a very appreciative and respectful pupil, always ready to learn from him who had so much to impart in the ways of love. When I say “love” here I invoke Eros, of course. What I had with Odysseus was pleasurable and informative, but what I truly wanted was what Achilles had with Patroclus. With time, as these things happen, I had outgrown my usefulness to him. With time, I watched Achilles and Patroclus turn to intermingled ashes in the same urn. I watched Troy burn. And my body forgot what it meant to have been someone’s eromenos. Instead, I had allowed years of flirtation with Discord to give way to fateful passion in the arms of a goddess.

I had wanted what Achilles had with Patroclus, and I had found it with Aramis. Who, while much my junior in centuries, in his Odyssean-like cunning had imparted something to me in the ways of love that no one before him could. The things he did to me… the things I _allowed_ him to do to me… I know, I _know_ Odysseus would not have approved, but what else could I do? He too had outgrown me, my Hyacinthus, and my love was the only thing I had to give him that was worthy of him, the only thing greater than myself. I couldn’t hold back, I couldn’t deny him the very _truth_ of it. 

_I’m yours._

_I want you. I want you to take me._

_I’m yours._

“Je t’adore,” he’d said.

He had spoken French to me, not Greek. He had gotten used to speaking this way to another, I did not know whom, but it mattered little. Because I’d had millennia to find him, so that I could lose myself in him.

“Je suis à toi,” I responded.

When had time and tongues blurred so much? But they were only words, fleeting, mutable words. I was much more interested in whether our hearts had changed at all. Had his twin souls evolved? Had he given one of them away to someone else?

I lay spent in his arms, his fangs retracted, but his mouth still attached to the crook of my neck, and I felt my blood pumping through his veins again, giving my own existence purpose. Our bodies were slick with perspiration, and more. I could feel his seed dripping out of me, over the backs of my thighs, mingling with the oil he had rubbed into my skin. The air was heady with the scent of summer blooms and our love making. In the distance, I heard an owl screech. 

And were the gods of Greece with us here? Or did we finally belong only to each other again?

I rolled over, my mouth found his again, and he pressed into my arms, making me ache with unquenchable hunger. 

“Will I ever get enough of you?” I sighed into his parted lips.

“I certainly hope not,” he responded, with his customary sangfroid. In fact, I wondered whether _sangfroid_ as a word did not come into existence in order to describe him. He was always like this - my north star, my Stella Maris, the steady point of my compass. While I… a vestige of my former self, I immolated myself in my meteoric fall from Olympus at the very thought of him.

“I want you,” I breathed into his neck. His satiated pulse beat a triumphant staccato against my lips.

“You have me,” he replied and guided my hand lower, down his heaving flank and into the space between his thighs where, to my deepest pleasure, I found him hard again. I wrapped my hand around the hot, tumescent flesh, and a whimper escaped his swanlike throat. “I missed your hands on me,” he said, his own hands on the nape of my neck, holding me close as he sucked first on my upper and then on my lower lip as if they were exotic berries. “I missed your mouth on me.”

I squeezed my fingers and ran my hand along his shaft, my thumb trailing concentric circles around the leaking head of his cock.

“I missed the feel of you inside me,” his breath caught as I pressed the pad of my thumb down, teasing at the slit, “Ah! _Athos_.”

I lowered my head to mouth at his beautiful collarbones, like the wings of a butterfly, splayed out beneath the hollow of his neck.

“I burn with jealousy at the thought of your other lovers,” I confessed, speaking into that sacred groove of his body that I had kissed so many times before, the intimate piece of flesh that haunted my dreams. Every part of him haunted my dreams. 

“No other man has taken me since you,” his voice sounded calmly over my head. 

“In nearly two centuries?” I looked up, afraid to read deceit upon his features.

“Does that surprise you? Whom would I have given myself to who could compare to you?”

“I don’t know. Porthos, perhaps.”

He laughed then, his charming, soundless laughter, and I felt a shiver of pleasure run through my own limbs as they wrapped around him.

“I assure you, nothing could have been further from my mind. And his.” He kissed me again through peels of silent giggles. “Besides, he’d probably split me in half.”

“Aramis…” 

“Shhh…” His mouth sealed to mine until he managed to suck on my tongue, pulling off slowly, almost painfully. “You’re the only one I want splitting me in half.”

I felt the throb of his cock inside my palm. His hips slammed forth and I had to tighten my grip to prevent him from spilling over. “Not yet, you beautiful boy,” I teased, feeling my features relax into a smile. 

“It’s been too long,” he sighed, his head thrown back so far that I could do nothing but latch my lips and teeth to the slope of his Adam’s apple. It bobbed inside my mouth, buoyed by his soft moans. His body shifted beneath mine and I felt his thighs wrapping around my hips, pressing me closer still into the wanting, waiting heat of his body.

I brought both his arms over his head, immobilizing his slender wrists with one hand, while my other hand reached for the vial with oil. He arched beneath me, feline grace and leonine ferocity.

“I kept yours, you know,” he whispered into my mouth. “The alabaster jar. I still have it.” The way he spoke of that souvenir bespoke of pain and I couldn’t help but fill with guilt and remorse again at the thought of it. “I kept your razor too. You shall have it back, I think.” His eyes sparkled in the night like falling stars. 

“What else did you keep?” I asked, my oil-slicked fingers finding the crevice between his thighs and stroking along it until I hit home. I circled the opening, slowly, tenderly, the way I had when I had first taken him in Varna, not wanting to hurt him, seeking to distract him with words and deeds. 

“Your… _ah!_... flagrum.”

My body shuddered with shocks of pleasure and I sank my teeth into his collarbones to prevent my own moan from escaping at the very thought of it. I licked and kissed over the marks of my teeth and then my lips traveled along his chest and buried in the soft, musky heat of his armpit, licking and biting at the flesh there, while he tried in vain to liberate his hands from my grip. 

“Ah!” his gasp as my finger slipped in was that of surprise. I lifted my eyes to his and he mouthed “More...” at me. I smiled and twisted my finger inside him, loving the tightness of him around my digit as much as I loved the heady scent of his body when it was free of perfumes and fine oils.

“Still not satiated, my demonic lover?”

My lips traveled over the broad muscles of his chest, committing his new measurements to memory as I reacquainted myself with his scent and taste. My tongue circled around one nipple, causing Aramis to buck up against me again. 

“You beast!” he teased me and I graced him with my most evil grin, knowing that I would take my time driving him as insane as he had driven me earlier.

“Are you still as sensitive as you once were, my lily of the valley?”

I flicked my tongue against the rapidly hardening nub and heard him hiss. His foot made vindictive attempts at stabbing into the back of my thigh, as I slipped in a second finger and pressed up until he arched off the bed again, and right into my mouth. I sucked him in, tongue circling the aureola, teeth gently tugging on the dark nub. His whimpers were worth more than rubies, more precious than ambrosia.

“I’m ready,” he begged, his cock stabbing into my abdomen in a rather militant fashion. I shut my eyes and felt my own blood coursing through him again, pooling there in the tumescent heat threatening to impale me.

“Almost,” I promised letting go of his abused nipple and sealing our lips together again. 

At last, I felt him to be sufficiently stretched, his thighs were already wrapped around me as if he was ready to gallop away on me, all night long, like the hags in the fairytales of his motherland. I quickly placed one of the pillows under his hips, to better angle him, and I felt the ravenous sting of his nails dig into my flesh.

“Need you,” he squeezed between his teeth.

For a moment, I hovered above him, suspended in a mesh of my own disbelief. Did he? Need me? In his lust-clouded eyes, I read nothing but love and desire, and I believed him. I had to.

“ _Now_ ,” his heels pressed into the backs of my thighs, spurring me on, for an inexperienced rider he was not.

I sank into him slowly, until our bodies came flush against each other again, until my face lowered over his and our foreheads touched and our breaths co-mingled. He did not speak again; he did not need to, our bodies communicating to each other the only things that mattered. Our covenant, the breaking apart of the mortal coils that held us distinct by insisting on fusing together. A supernatural symbiosis.

Could he read in my face what I read in his? There, in the depths of his obsidian eyes, I read the past century and a half. He was my Stella Maris and I was his. He had waited for me. With his ivory skin and his leathery wings, the timeless flittermouse of my biggest folly. There had been pain there during this vigil, but also joy, like grains of sand turning to pearls in an oyster shell that I could not begrudge him. He broke like a wave upon the rocks of our passion, I could see him coming apart at the seams, and I wanted to be the one to put him back together.

“Drink,” I told him, lowering my head so that my neck was within the reach of his fangs that gleamed in the darkness like fireflies.

He shook his head and clenched down around me. “No. You’re not strong enough.”

“I am strong enough for this,” I thrust forward to emphasize my intent, tearing another loud moan from his lips. “Drink.” 

His teeth puncturing my neck completed me and I spilled out and into him in every way I could.

The lassitude and contentment I felt was something akin to what a devout Catholic must feel after a heartfelt absolution. In that moment, I would have given anything, done anything at all that he may have asked of me. Perhaps, I would have done anything regardless. And did he know that, he who had been a monk in earnest in his human youth? Did he take me into his arms like a confessional in order to grant me absolution, or was it to sit in judgement over me like his One God?

“Athos,” his lips brushed against my earlobe.

“Mm?”

“You told me you would never die.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t die: my soul never went to the Stygian shores.”

“But you were taken from me.” His fingers turned my chin to face him and I watched his eyebrows knit together. “That can’t happen again.”

“It won’t,” I promised him, as ardently as I could.

“Then, why did it happen?”

“The Gods,” I muttered, my mind still enveloped in the fog of our shared passion. “The curse. I… flew too close to the sun.”

“The curse?” he shifted alongside me. “Athos, what did you do?”

“I didn’t mean to..,” I stammered. “She had disguised herself as your servant… And she wore your shirt… I… she handcuffed me to the bed.”

“ _What?_ Who?”

I should have told him before. I don’t know why I hadn’t. Perhaps I thought that by keeping silent I could pretend that we were still safe. Safe from Hera’s retribution. And now… what harm could it do now?

“Eris,” I said.

***

My blood ran cold. Unlike humans, who use that expression metaphorically, my blood did indeed run cold. I felt its temperature drop and its flow slow down to a sluggish pace, like syrup through my veins. Coldness rose to my brain and cut through the haze of lust and love that had cushioned my thoughts. I understood nothing of what Athos had said, and yet I could see the whole picture very clearly, like a man looking at a large painting from a distance took in the scene without recognising the details.

“What do you mean: disguised herself as my servant? Which servant?”

“Lysis.”

“Who?” I shifted away and he grabbed my hand, as if afraid to lose me. But I merely wanted to see his face. It was deathly pale, the flush of arousal had drained rapidly.

“Your servant, Lysis,” he repeated, frowning at me. “In Rhodes.”

I shook my head. Rhodes, that was two hundred years ago, nothing but a faint memory. I’d had countless servants since then (and yes, most of them had survived me, albeit not the passage of time).

“Don’t you remem-” he broke off and bit his lip, realising, no doubt, how long ago it had been. “No, of course not,” he said softly. “And she made sure to make herself inconspicuous.”

“Are you telling me I had a maidservant in Rhodes?”

“A goddess,” Athos whispered. “My sister.”

The deadly cold was freezing me slowly from the inside out. It had reached my tongue and paralysed my lips so that when I spoke it was through gritted teeth. “Discordia?” 

“Eris,” he repeated.

“Your _sister_.” My blood was so cold I could feel chips of ice float through my veins. “What exactly did she do?”

He was shifting away from me now, throwing his head back in that proud gesture that I’d always loved and never forgotten. “You _know_ what she did, Aramis.” His voice was firm and his gaze direct. “Don’t make me tell you.”

Something flittered at the edge of my vision; a dark shape, the shadow of black wings, and the echo of a voice: ‘ _Delilah._ ’

I rolled away and got up. I could have gladly killed him, only I knew I couldn’t. For a moment, I wondered what would happen if I ran him through with my sword. How long it would take him to recover. How painful it would be.

If he would fight back.

Our eyes met and something in his arrested me mid-motion. “Your _sister_ , Athos,” I threw in his face, pushing down on the heat that had exploded in my breast and spilled over, making the very skin of my arms burn. “You are as degenerate as the rest of your family.”

For a moment, I thought he would kill me, for I saw the reflection of his Thunderous Father flash up. But his voice did not match the thunderbolts cast from his eyes. “I know.” He was looking straight at me, as if challenging me to perform a deadly coup that he would parry with his own, not less lethal one. And yet, his voice, his voice… It was underpinned with dark velvet, not with sharp steel.

“How?” I closed my eyes and opened them again. “Why?”

Something in the sound of my voice must have unsettled him, too, for he raised himself up, almost reaching out for me. But his arm fell back and he said, “You weren’t there, Aramis. I remember… I wanted you so badly, and when I woke up-” He made a helpless gesture, rubbing his wrist as if the spectre of the manacles chafed him still. “She… _was_ there.”

“Are you blaming _me_?” I said through gritted teeth.

Athos stared at me in silence and burst out laughing. “No.” He fell back into the pillow and threw his arm over his face. “I’m not blaming you.” He was speaking in a low voice, as if to himself. “And neither did they.”

The torture was exquisite. The boiling cauldron within my breast, and yet my eyes travelled down the length of his body: the long throat; his ribcage shuddering with laboured breaths; his groin, soft and spent and spoiled; the long slim legs that had trembled under my touch not fifteen minutes ago. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could see his mouth, twisted in a grimace as he continued to speak in low, measured tones. “They blamed no-one but me. They punished me. It’s done, it’s over. My penance is done. It was-” he bit his lip and I expected blood to spill over. “ _My_ penance, Aramis.” He lifted his arm off his face and looked at me. “They spared you.”

“Do you think,” I swallowed and sank back on the bed, looming above him on my knees and not sure if I wanted to hold him or throttle him. “Do you really think that penance of yours hadn’t affected me?”

“You’re alive. You have been alive, and thriving, by the look of you.” He pushed himself up again so that we were face to face and shook his head when he saw I opened my mouth to speak. “You have been alive and happy, Aramis. Don’t tell me you have not. I can see it in you.” His gaze pierced me through, pinned me to the spot, bored into the centre of my soul. “I can smell it on you.”

“Smell what?”

Athos shrugged with well-practised nonchalance. “Whoever she is. You never told me her name. That French-speaking bint to whom you made your excuses at midday.”

“Athos!” No steel. There was no weapon within my reach, and I could not slap him like a commoner. My fangs dropped, grazed my tongue, and I hissed, shocked and confused. Athos smiled.

It was that smile that smashed the dams of my self-control. I threw myself on him with my teeth, even though I knew that this was not the way to chastise him. Had I really attempted to punish him, I would have left without another word. Instead, I hurt him, tearing through his skin and tendons. I marked him, with my teeth and nails. Blood spurted into my mouth, into my veins, melting the chips of ice that floated therein. Athos’ body was like a bowstring, vibrating with coiled power and with lethal energy. His nails dug into my back, into my hips, clawing at me like talons. I slithered astride him, his groin no longer soft and spent, but rigid, unrelenting. Pressing against me, as I rammed my hips into his abdomen to hear him grunt in pain. I ground my cock against his with the full weight of my body until sharp pain shot through me. Beneath my mouth, his throat vibrated with a sudden bark of laughter.

“You’ll have to do better than that, little chyortik.” Oh, that mocking tone of his, even as he was being sucked dry! I growled into the wound on his neck, arched my hips off him and plunged down on his dick, claiming him as _she_ had claimed him, many lifetimes ago.

The cry that tore from his throat gave me some satisfaction. But I wanted more, and I clenched around him, tightening all my muscles until he groaned and his trapped cock swelled. “Fuck, Aramis!” A pained whimper, which I chose to understand as a command. And so I pulled myself up and slammed back down on him, bruising myself on his hipbones. I rode him in furious self-abandon, forcing his breath out of him in desperate moans, which could not drown out the wet, filthy noise of our coupling.

His blood-soaked hair stuck to my fingers, my fingers stuck to his skin, and he was clinging to me with his arms and legs. Glued together as we were, I managed to angle my hips and push down harder, take him in deeper, and he went rigid between my legs, spilling himself inside me with a harsh sob against my shoulder.

I barely waited for his prick to stop twitching as it pumped his release out of him, before I heaved myself atop him, slid slickly astride his chest and pushed my cock between his lips. He sucked me in greedily and lifted his eyes to mine like a penitent. My breath stopped, my hips jerked, and Athos gagged as my seed flooded his throat. I sagged, suddenly boneless, and his arms were there to catch me, cradling me, steadying me gently, even though he was shaking from head to foot.

Sprawled atop him, our legs entangled, my hand hopelessly stuck in his hair, his fingers locked around my wrist like a manacle – I could not have left even if I tried. That’s why his next words made me snort with laughter. “Are you staying?” he muttered against my cheekbone, body going slack beneath me even as he attempted to form words.

“Always,” I muttered back into the damp heat in the crook of his neck. “Do you think I have a choice?”

I might not have spoken those last words aloud, drifting away into oblivion already. But he understood even so, the fingers around my wrist tightening in silent assent. “Stay.” One last word, or perhaps just the thud of his heartbeat under my ear. “Stay-stay-stay.” Like an enchantment, a spell and a promise at once. As sacred and solemn as the sacrament of blood that bound us together.

***

I had slept much longer than I had expected, which was not surprising since Aramis had drained me of my blood thrice that night. My body felt pleasantly languid and sore as I opened my eyes and found my bed empty. Before I had time to panic, my eyes fell upon a daintily folded billet upon my pillow. Inside was the name of a village on the road towards Languedoc. 

Grimaud stood at the foot of my bed, his head shaking in glaring reproof as he handed me a wet cloth which I used to wipe dried blood from my face, neck, and chest.

“I’ll have to strip and burn the sheets. There is no time to clean them,” he said.

I bid my farewell to the viscount a little before noon having broken fast together, letting him know that unexpected developments back home were calling me away, and promising to return for a visit as soon as was reasonable. He blessed me as we parted and insisted that I take my dear grandfather’s likeness with me. I had the flabbergasted Grimaud add the portrait to our meager luggage before we set out.

Aramis had already awaited me out there, at the appointed destination on the country road.

He had come for me last night as he said he would, he had stayed despite my fevered confession, and now in the light of day, I could not help but let the words escape that I had not uttered under the crescent moon at midnight.

“You came.”

“Did you doubt me again?”

“No.”

“I always come for you.”

“I know that, Aramis.”

The tension ebbed out of his shoulders. He glanced over at Grimaud, recognition washing over his features. “Grigoriy?”

“He goes by Grimaud now,” I said.

My guardian bowed all the way down to his horse’s mane at Aramis’ greeting. One would think the little monster was sincerely glad to see my lover returned. Regardless, I was grateful for his silence.

“Of course,” Aramis had smiled and brought his horse flush alongside mine. I watched in silence as our steeds’ ears fluttered next to each other. His hand, encased in a fine leather glove, alighted upon my own. “Are you ready to go see Porthos?”

“Are you asking me if I’m well enough?”

“I suppose I’m asking if _we_ are well enough,” he spoke quietly, his head close to mine.

I reached across my saddle and pulled him into a kiss. _My Father_ , I prayed as his lips parted against mine, _Who art up on Olympus and not in some such ‘heaven’ as they call it, hallowed be thine beard. Now that I have found him again, help me keep him. Do not take him from me again._

“We’re good then,” he pulled away with a wide smile on his face and touched his spurs to the flanks of his horse. I followed him, as I always did.

_And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. Amen._


End file.
